Breast cancer has been reported to home to the bone microenvironment and to adapt a quiescent phenotype in regions close to the endosteum, among the BM stromal compartment. About 85% of BC patients have osteolytic metastasis, and currently there is no detection method for BC metastases before osteolytic lesion onset.
Several models have investigated breast cancer cell-bone interactions in a two-dimensional (2-D) approach. It has been determined that this approach does not adequately represent the three-dimensional (3-D) in-vivo microenvironment. Thus 3D polymeric scaffolds can be an innovative strategy to mimic the tumor microenvironment in culture. Many research groups have begun studies looking into the cellular and molecular mechanisms involved between tumor cells and the bone microenvironment via 3-D matrices. However, most of these studies have been limited to matrices consisting of purified proteins such as collagen gels/collagen coatings which fail to portray the normal bone environment encountered by a single breast cancer cell in the metastatic process. Thus there remains a need for additional 3-D models.